Грег Иган - The Year's Best Science Fiction, Volume 1

In this situation, Bonnie was the food. Bonnie was having birthday drinks and she had gathered us here to sheepishly celebrate, since she’d reached the age where if you called yourself old, some people wouldn’t correct you and some people would get mildly offended.

Bonnie was late, as usual. She was chronically late and never apologized for it, maybe because she always looked super awesome, and truly she did, so she imagined that that was a fair exchange for the lateness, even for us.

While we waited, a few of us started discussing the list. Some time ago, a list had been released online of not-famous men who had done bad things to women, mostly of a sexual nature. Some men at the table started shifting in their seats, as if fidgeting done just right could teleport you to a distant land in which you felt not so implicated. Or they sat there like Easter Island heads, with equally as much to say about shitty men.

The door crashed open and Bonnie ran through the bar, stopping short at our table. Her makeup had sweated off into patchy plum and black smears under her eyes. Her hair was stringy and stuck to her cheeks. She did not look super awesome, but sometimes we looked like that and it wasn’t such a big deal so we weren’t going to make it one. Perhaps we could ask about it later, once we were all safely drunk.

“Happy birthday!” we said.

“Is today your real birthday?” someone said, as they stood to hug her. Bonnie accepted the hug but gave nothing in return, her arms wilted by her sides. She didn’t answer at first. She was busy peering around at all the wrong things, the ceiling and the bartender and the drinks on the table and our feet, like this was one of those kid puzzles where you had to spot the differences between two similar pictures. Her gaze was weird, fractured. She wouldn’t look at us.

“Bonnie?”

“My birthday,” she said too loud. “Yeah. My birthday. First of the month. Rabbit, rabbit.”

“I think you’re supposed to say ‘Rabbit, rabbit’ first thing in the morning, like the second you wake up,” said Nina. “Otherwise you don’t get the good luck.”

Scott said, “Jesus, is it already next month?”

“I know, right?” someone said.

“I didn’t mean that it was next month. I meant today is the start of a new month. Which is this month.”

“Yes. I got that.”

Bonnie listened along, as we all were whether or not we wanted to be since the bar was so quiet you couldn’t even grant the mercy of pretending not to hear. Then she lifted her palm. “HOLD THE MOTHERFUCK ON,” she roared. “Stop messing with me. Stop lying. I’ve been saying it all day; this shit is not funny. My birthday was last week and we all know it . You guys even did that conversation again. Like I could ever forget such a stupid-ass dumb-ass fucking conversation!”

“Whoa, calm down—” Scott said, valiantly trying to sound more worried about Bonnie than he was offended. He stuck his arm out to put around her and she shoved it away, tilting off balance. She propped herself against the brick wall of the bar and surveyed us from a cold and judgmental distance. “I do not appreciate it, and I do not see the point of it,” she said, voice wobbling. “This prank . You got my parents in on it, and you did something to my phone and laptop, you made it so that—” Bonnie broke off. She shook her head like it jangled and ripped something out of her purse and threw it at nobody in particular (it hit Scott on the thigh) and ran out of the bar. Scott silently showed us what she’d thrown. Today’s newspaper.

Some of us left. Some stayed, got more drinks, marinated in concern and theorized luxuriously. Shit got near convivial. I wasn’t Bonnie’s closest friend, but I was her roommate friend—her roommate-mate—so I was the one who went out after her. Even though I had no idea where she’d gone. Bonnie was not so much a woman of routine.

I decided to go home. With great relief and a tiny amount of surprise, I unlocked our door and found a trail of ankle boots, jacket, purse, phone, keys, dress leading straight to Bonnie’s bedroom. Of course. I could picture it exactly—Bonnie on her birthday, treating herself to a pregame that got so out of hand it became neither pre- nor game, then showing up to her actual celebration surreally out of her head. Sure.

When I knocked, Bonnie responded immediately. “This is all a dream,” she said in a shouty voice. She sounded like she was in a play, an amateur one with fake British accents. “Do not come in.”

“Are you okay? We were worried.”

I heard her bed creak, and tried again. “Do you want your phone? It’s out here.”

“ Fuck my phone ,” Bonnie yelled. “It’s fake and so are you and so is everything. Quit talking to me! I need to concentrate on waking up.”

I left her to it. I gathered up her things and piled them outside her door and I texted some people that Bonnie was fine and sleeping something off and I dicked around on my phone and saw that a famous man—one who had spoken out passionately against the sexual depredations of other famous men during the most recent outcry (for the sexual depredations of these other famous men had first come to light in the 1970s and ’80s, unfortunate timing if you wanted a critical mass of people to actually care)—was discovered to have been really, really not one to talk and I brushed my teeth and decided I deserved not to floss and then it was like half the blood and adrenaline and energy in my body swirled down into a drain somewhere with a loud abrupt gurgle and I oozed my way to bed.

The next morning Bonnie was gone, room tornadoed and big suitcase missing. A few days passed with no word from her so I pondered calling her parents. I had no kind of relationship with them, but I could probably get their info from billing statements. I didn’t do it. Bonnie loved her parents and wouldn’t want to worry them and Bonnie hated her parents and didn’t want to rely on them any more than she already was, which was basically 100 percent, and due to both of the aforementioned she loathed showing any kind of weakness in front of them.

A few days after that I got a text from Bonnie admonishing me specifically to not call her parents, and I responded and told her that I hadn’t but I almost had and if I had I would have done it days and days ago and where the hell was she? No response. Well, if that was how she wanted to play it. Meanwhile, I could have the place to myself. Fine.

“Still no word?”

Just a few of us left at the bar, dejected and alone together like we’d been stood up but in a polyamorous way.

“Do we think she forgot?”

“Her own birthday?”

“Or found something better to do. Not to talk shit but… Bonnie can be like that.”

“I have sympathy for the congenitally rich. You know how basically everything worth doing just sucks initially? Well, maybe if you never get training in dealing with bullshit, you risk becoming the kind of person who just bounces from thing to thing to thing and sooner or later everything seems boring and totally without reward or meaning. And then comes the ennui.”

“I have sympathy for myself .”

“Ennui isn’t Bonnie’s problem.”

“Right, she would actually be very happy if everything was only nice pleasant surfaces.”

“ Yes ,” we all said. And then we were off to the races.

“She’s so pissed off when everything isn’t happy and nice! Infuriated, even. Which is kind of at odds with being someone who loves happy and nice stuff, you know?”

“It’s not… not tyrannical. But she’s not one of those tyrants who, like, loves suffering and pain. She does truly love it when people are happy. Especially her friends.”